Thursday, July 03, 2014

Lakewood courtesy busing deal rejected

Private school leaders have rejected a 15-minute change in the start time for schools, even though the savings likely would have been enough to retain courtesy busing for all students, a district official said.

As a result, Lakewood is moving ahead with its plan to offer courtesy busing only to students in kindergarten through third grade, meaning thousands of students in the fourth grade and up will have to find another way to school.

In a private meeting Wednesday designed to find some solution to the district busing battle, Lakewood officials proposed that girls schools start at 8:45 a.m. and that boys schools start at 9:15 a.m. —instead of 9 a.m. for everyone. But the township's private school leaders said no, said Gus Kakavas, the district's transportation consultant. The change would have resulted in at least $3 million in savings, he said.

"We understand why they said no," said Kakavas, referring to concerns that staggered start times would negatively impact family dynamics. "But it undoubtedly would have saved us money."

With no alternate plans offered, Lakewood decided Wednesday to begin the bidding process that private bus companies will participate in for the 2014-15 school year, Superintendent Laura Winters said. Only students from kindergarten to third grade are set to receive the service, she said.

But a prominent rabbi involved in the last-minute discussions involving the private school leaders dismissed the district's deadline, saying that if a solution is found in the coming days, public school officials likely would amend their plans and expand the service.

"It's an artificial deadline," Rabbi Moshe Rev Weisberg said. "If additional resources come in, we will amend it, we will rebid it, we will do whatever is necessary."

Lakewood's $151 million budget for the upcoming year did not include approximately $4 million in courtesy busing — offered to children who live within 2.5 miles of their schools — for students in grades four to 12 because of cost constraints.

Roughly five out of six students in Lakewood attend private schools, which are also serviced by public buses.

Weisberg compared the prospect of Lakewood's children walking to school in September to that of three Israeli teenagers who were found dead in a pit in late June after they tried to hitchhike home in the West Bank.

"Let's not think of what could happen to our children if they decided to hitchhike to school," Weisberg said. "We don't buy that this is a luxury. This is for the safety of our children."

Up to now, efforts to secure additional funds from the state Department of Education for the service have been unsuccessful.

Members of the Iggud Hamosdos — a consortium of private schools in Lakewood — met this week to see if adjustments could be made from within.

But the leaders did not agree to concessions such as consolidating bus routes, staggering school start times or minimizing house stops.

"We're still forging ahead, trying to find a solution," said Weisberg, who expects meetings will continue in the coming days.

Last month, members of Iggud Hamosdos asked the parents of Lakewood's private school students to drive their children to their classes for two days rather than allow them to ride public buses as a "drill" of how the reduction of courtesy busing would impact township traffic in September.

On the protest's first day, parents on their own staggered the times they drove their children to school, leading traffic to not be dramatically worse than on a typical Lakewood day. When leaders asked the parents to basically leave at the same time on the protest's second day, traffic was much worse.

Most of Lakewood's private schools are Orthodox religious centers, a reflection of the township's growing Jewish population. In 2009, more than half of its residents were Jewish, according to a survey by the University of Miami and the University of Connecticut.

Lakewood's population is projected to grow from 92,000 in the 2010 U.S. Census to 220,000 by 2030.

Last week, Gus Kakavas was set to become a victim of Lakewood's courtesy busing wars, when the Board of Education voted not to renew his contract as the district's transportation consultant for the 2014-15 school year.

But Michael Azzara, a state monitor appointed to Lakewood to oversee its financial and educational decisions, overruled the board's decision.

Kakavas set Wednesday as the deadline for filing the bid specifications because he said the process takes a certain amount of time. Once Lakewood selects the transportation companies for the upcoming school year, everyone needs to become familiar with the routes and with who is doing what so the process is in place for the first day of school, he said.

"I've been doing this for many years, trust me when I tell you that it takes a certain amount of time to get it right," Kakavas said.